Men, Booze, and Tarot Cards: An Excerpt of Drinking With Men

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Rosie Schaap believes "every drink has a story to tell," she says. And it's this fundamental belief in the joint power of alcohol and storytelling that propels her debut memoir, Drinking with Men, published last week. Schaap is the voice behind the New York Times Magazine's "Drink" column, said her punchy book title was born of a night (rather, the end of a night) in a cab, "after having too much to drink and far too little to eat," she says. Her columns run the gamut from playful — such as musings on the joys of day drinking and bartender playlists — to serious, with ruminations on lost friends, family members, and the people in bars she says become your family. With her memoir, five years in the making, Schaap wanted to convey "the feeling that we're all just sitting together in a bar," and both the good and the bad that come with it. "You can't be the hero of your own story," Schaap says. "It'd be really boring if it's just triumph after triumph. And my book is definitely not."

Drinking With Men opens on Schaap at 15 in 1986 after having just developed a habit of drinking in the Metro-North Railroad's bar cars, with men twice her age who couldn't help but be fascinated with her age, her gender, and the tarot cards she played with at the time:

This guy was always drunker and louder than anyone else. Once, he cupped his hands into a makeshift megaphone and sort of stage-shouted at me, something like "The sixties are over, get a life!" It was pretty stupid, but it still rattled me in the middle of a reading and disrupted the flow. And as much as I basked in my bar car celebrity, I dreaded seeing that guy.

One Thursday, after I'd already served a few of my patrons, he half staggered, half swaggered over to me. "All right," he said. "This is total bullshit. But go ahead. Do mine." He plunked himself down across from me, his knees a little too close, sweat beading on his forehead. I wanted to tell him to go away. I wanted to tell him that his unwillingness to believe would insult the spirits that governed the cards and make them uncooperative. But I figured he'd call me out. That he'd call me a chicken. So instead, I said okay. I kept my cool and started my spiel: "Shuffle. Focus. Give the cards your energy." He rolled his eyes but played along.

He cut the cards once and handed me the deck, following my orders. I spread them out. First, his significator: the Ten of Swords, possibly the worst card of all, with a solitary, prostrate figure under a black sky, pierced in the back by all ten swords. It represents, in Waite's words, "pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation." The rest of the cards weren't much better. From the minor arcana, more swords. From the major arcana, he pulled the Tower, a card signaling corruption, destruction, and the presence of evil. He got the Death card, too. The Celtic Cross turned up little more than despair. And as much as I disliked the guy, I really didn't like what I saw in those cards. Not for anyone, not even for him.

I kept quiet for a few moments while I tried to figure out how to spin this. Anyone who read tarot cards knew that the Death card was not to be taken literally. It did not forecast imminent peril. It was about transformation: dramatic but necessary change. And the Tower, menacing as it was, might signal the obliteration of the negative forces in his life. But that Ten of Swords? I couldn't get around it, especially since it was his significator. Had it landed upside down, that would've tempered its meaning and softened the blow. But as it was, right side up, full strength, there was nothing good I could say. Maintaining eye contact is key to being a good mystic, but I couldn't even meet his gaze.

"Well, what's it say?" he finally asked.

I took a deep breath. "None of this is carved in stone or written in blood—"

He cut me off. "Well. What?"

So I told him what I saw. Things looked bad. Where destruction was already underway, there was likely more to come. The isolation, aloneness, and despair he felt held out little hope of diminishing anytime soon. Change was coming, that was clear, and it would be something dramatic, but probably not for the better. And as I interpreted one dismal set of symbols after another, the guy leaned in closer, put his elbows on the table, buried his head in his hands, and started to cry.

He told me that his marriage was falling apart. That he constantly worried about his health. That he was too young for heart problems, but he had them anyway. That he felt as though his whole life had added up to zero. He asked: "Will I ever be happy?" The cards, I answered bluntly, said no.

"But," I told him, just like I told everyone else, "you have the power to change that." He shook his head and glared at me with red, swollen eyes that said No. I don't.

I did not want to believe him, but I held myself back. I had no business contradicting him, arguing with him, trying to make him feel hopeful. Maybe he was right. Maybe he didn't have the power. Maybe no one had the power. Maybe the days that lie ahead of us are set in stone and written in blood, and that was that. And it occurred to me that maybe I'd been the cynic: Something I had believed in had become a shtick, a gambit for attention. I hadn't thought it through. Maybe I'd even hurt people.

In the background, other passengers were caught up in conversation, laughing and drinking and carrying on. I could think of nothing more to say to the guy. Nothing reassuring. I felt small and foolish, incapable of any small comfort or kindness, and when the guy got off the train a couple of stops before mine, I was relieved.

I sat awake in my bed that night and thought about him. I imagined him going home to a white-clapboard colonial, to an unhappy wife pretending to be asleep. I imagined him returning the next day to a job he hated and getting wasted again that afternoon. But of course at fifteen, I really couldn't imagine what it was like to be him, to live his life. And I realized I didn't want to be able to. I didn't want to be adult enough yet to understand where he was coming from. Reading tarot cards in the bar car had been fun until it got serious. Adults had problems I could not begin to fathom, that I should not wish on myself, no matter how badly I wanted to grow up. And they had things to say I wasn't ready to hear, and to which I was incapable of responding with any real empathy.

I didn't go back to the bar car. I missed the drinks. I missed the grown-ups. I missed their attention. But I was not one of them. For the first time in my life — but not the last — I felt sharply and unhappily aware that I was getting older. That I wasn't exactly a child anymore. I was in the border-lands, neither here nor there, old enough to see that I was too young for the bar car, even though I desperately wanted to be there. I had been little more than a pretender, but I had felt, at least for a little while, like a regular, and for reasons I didn't yet understand, that feeling mattered to me, and I sensed that it always would. But I knew I didn't belong there — not yet — although I could feel adulthood encroaching, real adulthood, which now seemed less about drinking and smoking and freedom and more about loss and fear and the sense that Death itself lay waiting somewhere just ahead.